The wingback chair is a chair, which is usually fully upholstered, with wings rising up from the arm and joining the back at a 90-degree or wider angle. The original purpose for the wings were assumed to be to prevent drafts in old houses from reaching the upper body or to protect the delicate skin of gentrified ladies from the heat of a roaring fire in the hearth.

Every room needs seating of one form or another. Lounges will often uses sofas or settees but these are space hungry and inflexible items of furniture. In a small room they consume all the space, making it difficult for people to move around behind the sofas. Ironically in a very large room a sofa or even a couple of large settees can look badly out of place, because there is just so much room outside the space enclosed by the sofas.